The age of information overload

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The age of information overload [Copy link]

Original source: Age of information overload By Anick Jesdanun

(AP) Books are being scanned for easy online retrieval, TV shows are being recorded and archived for later viewing online, and radio programs are being digitized -- becoming podcasts.

We'll soon have access to much of the world's knowledge at the tap of a few keys, and we'll do it from almost anywhere - look, the latest iPods can hold all your music, digital photos and classics like "The Works of Alfred Hitchcock" and, of course, today's prime-time shows.

Does all this instant access to information make us more relaxed or more nervous? When do we stop to think?

"People are constantly trying to keep up with the amount of information they have," said David Greenfield, a psychologist who wrote the book "Virtual Addiction." "There's an upper limit to what we can handle."

Perhaps the only way to deal with the problems brought about by advanced technology is to invent better technology.

Of course, if used properly, these new information resources still have great potential to shape the way we live, learn, and think.

Let’s take a look at the books.

Nicole Quaranta, a 22-year-old graduate student in education at New York University, does most of her research online, searching many databases of scholarly journal articles but rarely books, even though she sometimes recognizes that a 300-page tome that took its author years to write has some unique ideas.

“The library was a little bit frustrating because I had to go there and everything was organized by academic field, and I didn’t even know where to start,” Quaranta said.

If the books in the library could be searched as easily as web pages, she might consider it again, but otherwise, these books would be as if they did not exist to her.

As a generation grows up expecting everything to be online, libraries, nonprofits and big companies like Yahoo! and Microsoft are busy spending billions of dollars to scan books and other printed materials and put them online. HarperCollins even announced in mid-December that it would digitize its vast catalog.

However, there are still copyright restrictions on searching for most works. For example, Google only displays a small number of pages of works on the Internet and directs those who want to read the whole book to bookstores or nearby libraries. But even so, publishers and author groups have filed lawsuits against it.

Online searches enable scholars and lay readers to obtain first-hand materials from books rather than second-hand materials such as inaccurate or biased online posts.

"There are a lot of really good books that are not well-known but are simply impossible to get," said Dick Gross, 61, a retired radiation physicist in Oregon who scours the country for old editions for his Bible teachings. "They're all locked away in someone's library, and people who live far away can't see them."

Alan Staples Jr., a 23-year-old businessman from Lawrence, Kansas, likes the idea of searching for books online so much that he's willing to pay for them just to avoid a trip to the library.

In fact, Amazon Web Services announced a similar plan in November and is currently communicating with publishers to acquire the corresponding rights.

At the same time, television programs that were previously not readily available online or were locked in broadcast studios are now available for online retrieval.

"Before, once programs were finished, they disappeared and contributed little to our knowledge space," said Jakob Nielsen, a web design expert at the Nielsen Norman Group.

Over the past year, Google has been digitizing audio and video news and other programming from several San Francisco Bay Area television stations, including the "Welcome Back Kotter" show. (Although Google has limited itself to showing a single still and subtitles until it can sort out the copyright issues involved.)

Early next year (2006), America Online and Warner Bros. will make many old TV shows available for free online.

Apple Computer also recently began selling old and new ABC and NBC Universal shows for $1.99 each -- available on computers and their newest iPods, including "Lost and Law & Order."

TiVo has also been more flexible, expanding its digital recording service to allow video to be transferred to the iPod and Sony's portable entertainment platform (PlayStation Portable).

In terms of audio material, National Public Radio has started producing free podcasts that are short and concise and can be listened to by anyone with a music player at any time and place.

Of course there is also a lot of direct digitization of information: for example, on sites like Yahoo's Flickr, digital photos can be easily shared, even among strangers.

Steve Jones, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, believes that centralization and easy access can make people more relaxed and at ease, allowing them to focus more on evaluating the value of information without having to spend a lot of effort searching for it.

But there is a danger, he argues, that people will take information for granted: thinking that what comes first is the best.

What's worse is that people do simplify it this way.

Jennifer Kayahara, a sociology graduate student at the University of Toronto, conducted a real survey showing that if this simplification is done, people will suffer.

"For those who don't do extensive online research, the reason they give is, 'There's too much information,'" she said, coupled with the fear that people might miss something and not have the time to search it out.

The point is: Technology tools push the items you search for or want to the top, even if you don't notice them. Search analyst Danny Sullivan describes such technology tools as "a kind of metal detector or magnet that can find the good stuff among the junk."

Virtual communities will change all that.

An online bookmarking service called del.icio.us, which was just acquired by Yahoo, helps you discover new Web sites by showing you where people with similar bookmarks hang out. The idea is that people with similar bookmarks are likely to have common interests.

Imagine the possibility if a group of scholars studying African history could get one set of search results, perhaps focused on books and scholarly journals, while music lovers using the same search could get another set of results, focused on entertainment.

Del.icio.us, Flickr, and some new services support tagging, a function that organizes items by keywords. The wisdom of the crowd applied to tags can certainly identify things that computers cannot retrieve in other ways.

The technology itself is not important; search companies are actively seeking better technology, especially in retrieving audio and video information.

"As we put millions of movies, books and music online, social networks, search engines and all sorts of other inventions became very important," said Brewster Kahle, a search pioneer who founded the Internet Archive, a nonprofit preservation organization.

If you search, even more important are good search skills—infoliteracy—knowing where and how to search and how to evaluate the information you find.

This is particularly important as people are overwhelmed by 24/7 digital information, as not only computers but also mobile phones have become search and browsing tools, and iPods have become small TV players.

Rachel Edelman, a 21-year-old junior communications student at New York University, finds that her old iPod, which only plays music, is distracting enough. "If I'm listening to music, I can't think about anything else, not homework, friends, family or anything else, even just what's happening on the street or in the city," she said.

As wireless access permeates every aspect of our lives—it's even breaking into airplanes and taxis—we will have to carve out new information-age habitats.

"If you're being bombarded with media all the time except when you're sleeping, where do you have time to think for yourself?" said Jakob Nielsen, a web design expert at the Nielsen Norman Group. "You may have all the pieces of information, but the highest level is knowledge and understanding. If you're being bombarded with that endless stream of information, you definitely don't have time to think deeply."

All you can do is lie down!